Fish­eries Mu­seum

Univer­sity of Hull, au­thor of

“The Royal Mu­se­ums Green­wich web­site is a must. Firstly, the Caird Li­brary pages con­tain a cat­a­logue of its rich book and man­u­script col­lec­tions, and also a set of re­search guides ( rmg.co.uk/ re­searchers/li­brary/ re­search- guides) cov­er­ing ships’ reg­is­ters, crew lists and cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of cap­tains, mates and en­gi­neers. Th­ese are as use­ful as any avail­able on­line, though they do un­der­play the fact that the reg­u­la­tions for fish­ing ves­sels were slightly dif­fer­ent to mer­chant ships, or were in­tro­duced at dif­fer­ent times.

“At some point, most re­searchers will need to con­sult orig­i­nal doc­u­ments, and the ‘Aeon’ cat­a­logue sys­tem is a com­pre­hen­sive and fairly user-friendly means of iden­ti­fy­ing and order­ing those held by the mu­seum.

“How­ever, more records are be­ing placed on­line, a trend the mu­seum has joined by digi­tis­ing all of its crew lists for 1915 in part­ner­ship with The Na­tional Ar­chives ( 1915crewlists.rmg. co.uk). Search­able for free by name, rank, birth­place and ship, it will re­turn a scanned pic­ture of the orig­i­nal crew list or a link to TNA’s Dis­cov­ery cat­a­logue. The re­sults show digi­tised de­tails of each man – or woman in some cases – serv­ing on board, show­ing their age and the last ship they served on (see more on p61).

“Fi­nally, the RMG web­site con­tains the Mar­itime Memo­ri­als data­base ( blogs.rmg.co.uk/memo­ri­als), which de­tails church, ceme­tery and pub­lic memo­ri­als to sea­far­ers. This is not com­pre­hen­sive yet, but is grow­ing fast and in time will rep­re­sent a su­perb re­source. There’s also a page to rec­om­mend memo­ri­als that have not yet made it onto the data­base.”

The Re­search Guides sec­tion on the Royal Mu­se­ums Green­wich site If your an­ces­tor worked on a ves­sel that was too small to have a crew list, then lo­cal mu­se­ums may be able to help with in­for­ma­tion